Deutsche Bank's Trading At a Quarter of Book Value and Here's Why
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Deutsche Bank is trading at 1/4 its book value. Book value is the measure that the street uses to value banks. Unfortunately, boo value is meaningless for banks today, who's books are no longer marked to market, distorted by negative interest rates and transformed by Harry Potter style accounting. It appears as if the market is not going for it. We, at Veritaseum, never did! Here's an example of why oen should heavily discount DB's book value number. Mortgages are one of the, if not the, biggest loan buckets on DB's balance sheet. Five percent of those mortgages are underwater (guaranteed losses). Seventeen percent are over 70% loan-to-value ration. Well, you may be saying to yourself "That's not bank run material".

The German housing market is on an absolute tear. One could be tempted to say its a bubble, but the German economy is the strongest in all of Europe, right? It's the engine that powers the EU, right? Well, German home prices have handily outgrown, and continue to do so, German wage growth - by a very wide margin. So, if real wages aren't powering these fantastic price gains, then what is???

IF the ECB fails to perfectly juggle all of those negative interest rate balls simultaneously (unlikely) then DB will have a hell of a Bear Stearns/Lehman-like problem on its hands, as housing prices crash and DB's mortgage portfolio goes from 5% underwater (likely quite understated) to something like 30-40% underwater. There goes bank equity and here come bank bail-ins!